Specs:
Early 2011 15" Macbook Pro (Sierra).
RAM upgraded October 2016, 16GB Corsair
SSD upgraded July 2016, 256GB SanDisk
- Battery replaced January 2016
- Logic board replaced February 2016 (replaced as result of qualifying for the gfx card recall.)
Basically a year old computer
Problem:
Yesterday it started crashing while signing into a user account -- while connected to power. The flow is as follows:
- Boot (Grey screen with Apple logo)
- Display user accounts
- Sign in to user's account
- Sign in progress bar
- Crash at ~1/3 complete progress bar
- Reboots automatically
Background:
Over the past 1.5 months the battery has become seemingly defunct.
- Initially, it would crash after ~2 minutes of use after waking from sleep and running off battery. It would need to be connected to power in order to start up successfully.
- After about 2 months of this, it began crashing while running off battery regardless of whether or not it had woken from sleep.
- Now it (usually) crashes within seconds if the charger is disconnected.
When I went to the Genius Bar I was told it may be a bad battery. It passed all of their diagnostics, however, it seemed to heuristically lose charge quickly and the capacity came in at over 100% -- which is only expected from batteries right out of the factory.
This all seemed like a case of a bad battery until yesterday. Maybe these issues are not connected... but seems like they could be.
Troubleshooting:
So far I've tried:
Tried 4 separate properly 85W MagSafe chargers. Same results.
- So it's not the bad battery.
Booted from an external bootable drive (running El Capitan). Same results.
- So, not an issue with the SSD nor corrupt OS (I think. Booting from an external drive should bypass the internal drive completely. Yes?*)
Ran the extended hardware test. No issues found.
- So, not an issue with RAM. I am going to try and run memtest if I can get access to a shell.
Left it idle for ~15 minutes at the login screen. Does not crash.
Spent ~15 minutes in the guest account (the safe account -- only Safari access) and messed around. Does not crash.
Spent ~2 hours of time in the "BIOS" pages. Hardware test, Disk Utility, etc. Does not crash.
Booting into safe mode (Cmd + S) displays
BuildError(): error building a user of type
Hypothesis:
It seems the issue is occurring when the boot program is loading the OS. I don't know a ton about how things work at this level, but my guess is the logic board is the culprit and is failing during this handoff.
Questions:
- Any ideas?
- Could a bad battery somehow bust up power management -- or is it entirely isolated whilst connected to external power?
- Have I done enough to rule out corrupt software, SSD, and RAM?